Electronic monitoring systems are used to monitor and in some cases configure and control assets. For example, an electronic monitoring system may be used in a plant, such as a process plant, a power plant, etc., having numerous pieces of machinery and other equipment that need to be monitored. The plant may include motors, pumps, heat exchangers, valves, and other devices, all of which may be generically called “assets,” and one or more monitoring devices (which are also assets) that may be attached to or associated with each of these assets for monitoring one or more parameters of the associated assets. The monitoring devices may be grouped together and serviced by different computer applications. For example, there might be one application for vibration monitoring, another application for temperature monitoring and yet another application for monitoring the position and operation of valves within a plant. Still other applications may be associated with performing various types of analysis on the assets or using data provided by the assets. Each of these applications may produce a tremendous amount of data. As an example, the applications may identify important occurrences which may be generically called “events.” An event may be, for example, a temperature that is too high, a valve that is operating improperly, or the detection of a failed sensor. An event may also be representative of a physical thing such as the detection of vibration in a motor that exceeds an alarm level. In any case, these events generally need to be reported to one or more users, such as plant operators, maintenance personnel, monitoring personnel, etc., and each application will have some strategy for reporting such events. Thus, as will be understood, various different monitoring applications may access and use data from different assets, from some of the same assets or from various sets of overlapping assets. A vibration monitoring application, for example, may need to access data from or about some of the same assets as an oil monitoring application. However, as the various monitoring applications may be developed by different developers, and may be primarily designed for use by different persons in a process plant or in another asset environment, there is typically no current structure within a plant that allows the various monitoring applications to efficiently operate to obtain and use the plant data needed by these applications.